Email and other forms of electronic messaging have grown from a novelty to a convenience to a mainstay of personal and business communication. Emails may contain trivial information that is quickly deleted or they may contain important information that a user wishes to reference in the future. The growing popularity of the latter type of email has led many email hosting services to allow users to archive messages rather than deleting them, removing the messages from the user's inbox but preserving them for later reading. Many email hosting services may make the task of finding relevant emails easier by allowing users to categorize emails with tags, folders, and other such mechanisms. Users may then later search through folders for tagged messages in order to find the message they are looking for. Some email clients and services may also provide users with the ability to create automated rules that categorize emails by folder or tag.
However, traditional systems for allowing users to categorize emails with automated rules may only apply the rules to emails currently in the user's inbox. Any message in other folders, including archived messages, may not be subject to the rules, causing the user frustration when they later search for categorized messages and receive inconsistent results. The instant disclosure, therefore, identifies and addresses a need for systems and methods for consistently applying rules to messages.